Healthcare Information Technology Company Ensures Performance of SaaS Application with NETSCOUT

Customer Profile

This well-respected, healthcare information technology company has been an innovative provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications and services to some of the world’s largest and best-known hospitals and healthcare networks around the world. It takes 25,000 employees in offices in North and South America, Europe, and Asia to deliver high-quality, always-available access to mission- critical healthcare applications used by staff in more than 20,000 facilities worldwide. 

Like any company in the SaaS industry, quality delivery of application services and end-user experience is absolutely essential to customer sites, and revenue renewals. It is a simple model: when performance of the service is poor, customers may look to competitors as an alternative. This was no different for this healthcare SaaS organization and their Information Technology (IT) team, who were committed to ensuring peak performance for their user community. 

The Challenge

This technology company had long recognized that delivering a SaaS service consistently, to thousands of healthcare locations worldwide, problem-free, around the clock, was a monumental challenge. To proactively address potential issues, they had partnered with NETSCOUT^® to leverage the nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution to help maintain the quality, availability, and reliability of their SaaS applications and services. 

Broad visibility was also a challenge for this healthcare technology company. Managing the performance of their global, multi-cloud environment was under the control of the IT organization. However, their customers accessed the services over an infinite number of paths from their own hospitals, campuses, and medical buildings, over different ISPs, that might be routed differently every time. Troubleshooting the true source of log-in problems or a slow response time issue for customers without proper visibility was daunting, if not impossible. 

Last, but not least, was how to get the most value from the NETSCOUT solutions while simultaneously supporting the IT teams and their customer issues around the world, regardless of the time of day or day of the week. 

Solution in Action

As a current NETSCOUT customer, this healthcare technology company had deployed InfiniStreamNG COTS-based appliances and vSTREAM virtual appliances for packet-based monitoring throughout their SaaS delivery network to deliver smart data for analysis with their nGeniusONE service assurance platform. To gain deeper end-user experience analysis, focused on specific customers using their SaaS services, the IT team had recently implemented nGeniusPULSE, which uses nPoint devices for synthetic testing that includes configurable business transaction test (BTT) analysis. Knowing that in many cases, the technology company lacked visibility into their customer facilities, the use of the nPoint technology gave them additional analysis capability into the transaction path between the SaaS application in the company’s data center and the customer location when an issue was experienced or reported. 

Advocates of an outsourcing model, the IT team for the technology company also selected NETSCOUT’s managed service program, NETSCOUT Visibility as a Service (VaaS) to implement, configure, and manage NETSCOUT equipment, including developing BTT scripts to mimic a user transaction or engagement. NETSCOUT’s follow-the-sun managed service ensured that assistance was available to all the technology company’s IT team wherever they were located and whenever they were needed. 

Even more critical, the VaaS team of experts proactively monitored statistics, alerts, and incidents for the technology company implementation, often advising IT that an issue was emerging and, using best-practices analysis, provided conclusions and recommendations on resolution. The combined efforts of the technology company’s IT organization and NETSCOUT’s VaaS team successfully reduced time to knowledge and restoration (MTTK and MTTR) - discovering problems earlier in their lifecycle and pinpointing the source of issues for quick restoration. 

In one recent case, the SaaS provider was working with a hospital network in the U.S. that was also a user of NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and nGeniusPULSE service assurance technology as well as NETSCOUT VaaS managed service. When end-users experienced issues with the SaaS applications, the two IT teams collaborated with the VaaS experts to troubleshoot the problem between the two environments. The use of nPoint BTTs, configured by VaaS, which followed the steps the user employed in logging-in and using the application, provided critical insights to identify where the issue was occurring and a plan to rectify the problem. 

The Results

For this healthcare information technology company, ensuring their SaaS applications are delivered with the highest quality for flawless end-user experience is job one. For the information technology company, It ensures customer retention while preserving their customer-centric reputation. 

As customers see the results of using NETSCOUT service assurance solutions proactively to reduce MTTK and MTTR, they value the SaaS company as a trusted partner in ensuring access to patient affecting information for their doctors and nurses is as expeditious as possible. 

The IT team now relies on the 24 x 7 x 365 VaaS team for global, managed service and support, which is helping to extend the value of nGeniusONE and nGeniusPULSE through optimal use of as many of the features and capabilities as possible. Executive reports, regularly prepared by the VaaS team, are shared with appropriate executives to provide valuable insights into utilization, trends, issues, and potential considerations that may positively impact their customers and the SaaS ecosystem itself. 

Bottom line – for this technology leader, offering a service that is always on, for an industry that is always on, it is only appropriate to have visibility and service assurance that never sleeps, as well. NETSCOUT is helping ensure performance and availability for this essential healthcare service and its customers.